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Friday, April 19, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

That Didn’t Take Long

MANHATTAN (CN) - An insurer says it need not pay a woman for the $100,000 policy on her common-law husband because she killed him an hour and 20 minutes after the policy took effect. SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance says Medine Jeanty "intended to murder the insured at the time she applied for and obtained the insurance coverage."

Jeanty is in prison. One of her daughters also died in the fire that killed her husband, SBLI claims in New York County Court. It claims Jeanty paid the first premium on her husband's policy, $134.50, in cash on Nov. 26, 2003. The policy took effect on Dec.2. She got separate coverage for herself and her two children, Nicolle, then 6, and Rianne, then 2.

SBLI says that at 1:20 a.m. on Dec. 2, 2003, "roughly eighty minutes after the policy went into effect, Jeanty started a fire at her residence while the insured and Jeanty's two daughters were sleeping inside the apartment."

Her companion, Sam Solise, the father of at least one of her children, died, and so did 2-year-old Rianne, the complaint states.

"The Queens County District Attorney charged Jeanty with murder, manslaughter, arson and reckless endangerment," the complaint states. "Jeanty pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree" and was sentenced to 19 years in prison, it states.

SBLI seeks rescission, saying the contract was void ab initio.

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